Happy Monday and happy April Fool’s Day! I hope everybody is able to find some new shows to enjoy this season! Feel free to use this thread to talk about any anime-related topic you want, including the new lineup of shows for the Spring season. For reference, here is a list of all the shows this season.
Just as another reminder, as of today, the bot is going to be making all the episode discussion threads going forward. For more information on the bot and how to request a thread that was not created, see the wiki!
As always, remember to be mindful of spoilers. If you want to know more about how to handle spoilers in this community, check the guide here (also linked in the sidebar).
tl;dr:
Hi fellow purveyors of anime! Today marks an important day in this community. Namely, the day that our resident bot took over all the duties of episode discussion thread creation. You might have noticed that rikka has been making more and more posts over the past week or two as I have slowly let her take over a couple shows. I have added a link to the sidebar about how to use the bot for episode discussion posts, so hopefully it can be a fairly smooth transition.
I have also enabled her ability to create the summary post that is pinned to the community of the most recent discussion thread for each show (sorted in reverse chronological order of when she made them or I manually entered them into her database). Currently, I have set it up so that a show will stay on that post for up to 8 days. If it has been >8 days since the last discussion thread for a show, it will be dropped from that post. I am open to feedback about whether this time is ok. It means, for instance, that if a show skips a week, it will be dropped from the summary post for ~6 days leading up to the resumption of airing.
Something else about the bot I wanted to disclose is what I am setting as the initial engagement metrics to determine whether an episode discussion thread has enough activity to warrant the next episode getting a discussion thread. To start this new paradigm, I have set the limits very low. Namely, I disabled the upvote threshold and set the comment threshold to just a single comment. So, that means that as long as an episode discussion thread has a single comment by a user, then, when the next episode airs, a new discussion thread will be created.
I am hoping that, if people stop watching a show, then they will simply not post in that show’s discussion threads. So, if there are no comments for a show’s episode, then the show will simply be disabled when the next episode airs instead of having a new thread created.
Something to note is that thread creation by pm’ing the bot is not subject to this kind of engagement thresholding. For example, let’s say a show’s episode 2 thread has zero comments. This means that when episode 3 airs, rikka will simply disable the show instead of creating an episode 3 thread. However, a user is always able to pm the bot and get an episode 3 thread created that way.
I will be monitoring this because it is prone to abuse if users simply spam the bot with tons of requests for shows that they are not watching or engaging with. So, if you request a thread from the bot, please at least constructively comment in the thread that is created. Otherwise, what was the point? It is just a roundabout way of spamming the community.
In any case, please enjoy the Spring season as the new shows get started. Thank you everybody for all the contributions you make to the community (even you lurkers!). Looking forward to the new era of the community as we continue to grow.
All hail Rikka our chuuni overlord bot!
Thanks for all the work.
Rikka is getting a good start, I found out an episode has aired by seeing a discussion thread posted. Thanks for the good work.
How is rikka going to handle recap episodes? I wouldn’t expect any comments for most of those.
I haven’t worked on Rikka specifically, but my assumption would be that said scenario requires a manual post creation for the episode thereafter.
I went back and checked how my test-instance of rikka handled the Solo Leveling recap episode this past season, and it skips over the recap episode and resumes posting threads when there is a new episode. This is because the recap episodes are not listed in the AniList api that rikka uses to determine episode airtimes. So, if a user wanted to create a discussion thread for a recap episode, it would need to be created manually by me rather than automatically by the bot.
I went back and checked the logs for Solo Leveling on my test-instance of rikka and I was correct in guessing that recap episodes are not listed in the AniList api. So, the recap episode would simply not get a discussion thread from rikka.
That is a really good question. The answer is that it depends on how recap episodes are or are not presented in the AniList api, since that is what rikka uses as her source. I suspect that recap episodes are not presented in the api, so rikka will just skip over them without making a post, and simply make a post for the next sequential episode.
I wish I had paid attention to this during Solo Leveling’s recent recap episode. Thanks for putting this on my radar. This and batch releases are probably the two outstanding issues that I don’t yet know a good technical solution for.
Are there any plans to move rikka over to c/episode_discussion? I know originally discussion threads were only temporarily allowed here because shinobu was having problems, so I’m curious what the plans are going forward. Either way, rikka seems to be working great so far, so nice work!
No plans to move it at the moment. I think that this community has grown large/active enough that it can bear the volume of posts that rikka is generating. I have overall been pretty happy with how things have been going with the episode discussion threads in the anime community. If I had to be picky, I think that the volume of posting is a bit high right now, but I expect that to drop off as people start dropping shows and stop commenting in threads. Also, making that worse, anime news has been really slow ever since Anime Japan 2024 ended (2 weeks ago). So, the volume of posts other than episode discussions has been slow (I have been working on making some anime clips to post to help this issue).